Red Hat Debuts CloudForms and OpenShift for Cloud Deployment

Red Hat is moving beyond its Cloud Foundations effort to deliver new Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions.
New solutions for creating and managing clouds announced, but they're not all open source -- yet.

Red Hat CloudForms is the new IaaS offering building on a collection of more than 60 open source projects. CloudForms include application lifecycle management capabilities as well as the ability to create hybrid public and private clouds.

Bryan Che, product marketing manager at Red Hat, noted during a press conference announcing CloudForms that without the ability to leverage resources from across the entire IT infrastructure, the full benefits of the cloud are not fully realized.

Che said that with CloudForms, Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) aims to provide capabilities in complete compute resource management. He added that CloudForms includes application management tools that will help bring applications into the cloud as well as manage applications in the cloud.

CloudForms takes advantage of the Deltacloud APIs, which enables users to manage multiple clouds. Red Hat first began working on Deltacloud in 2009 as a mechanism for abstracting cloud interfaces.

OpenShift

The other key part of Red Hat's new cloud push is the OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) technology. The cornerstone of OpenShift is the Makara technology Red Hat acquired in November 2010.

"OpenShift is Red Hat's open source approach to platform as a service," Isaac Roth, PaaS Master at Red Hat said during the press conference.

Red Hat is providing Openshift in three flavors: a free Express edition, the Flex edition with built-in monitoring, and the Power edition for large scale deployments.

Although Red Hat is positioning OpenShift as an open source solution, that's not exactly the case at the current time. In response to a question during the press conference, Roth admitted that certain parts of OpenShift are not open source.

"There are certain parts of OpenShift which are not yet open source, like the UI code for example," Roth said. "We do intend to open source OpenShift, we don't have a timeline today, but we're working on it."

For the past several years, Red Hat has been pushing its cloud agenda under the banner of the Cloud Foundations program. Neither OpenShift nor CloudForms, however, are part of Cloud Foundations.

"Red Hat Cloud Foundations took our existing product portfolio and showed customers how to build clouds using the wide range of product we had in the marketplace," Che said. "With CloudForms and OpenShift, we are introducing brand new offerings built on top of the success that our customers had already been achieving with Cloud Foundations."

VMware is also active in the PaaS marketplace with its open source Cloud Foundry project. Red Hat did not respond to a request for comment from InternetNews.com about the competitive nature of OpenShift versus Cloud Foundry.